My friend and co-worker had shot a video of a really cool mechanical spider that his brother built and added it to a story about it. That was about a year ago.

Today, he found his video on the MSN Video website, with no attribution and ads displayed alongside it. See for yourself. And the video is now tagged “StupidVideos.com” and is available here, uploaded by “Anonymous”.

I think MSN’s editors need to do a better job of checking where a video is coming from before they decide it is in the public domain. Is it hard to figure out if a video is not in the public domain? Yes. Is that an excuse to not do it? Of course not.

I think every cat owner dreads the inevitable hairball, especially if they go unnoticed as you stumble to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Yeah.

Anyway, a sign like this would be great. Especially if it could place itself ;)

Cat owner note: we were on Medi-cal food for Nala for a long time, she being a ‘geriatric’ kitty now. Anywho, after many months of her giving me the evil eye, I figured out she simply didn’t like it anymore. We switched to Eukanuba for Seniors (the only brand we could find that did not have meat ‘byproducts’ as the first ingredient, but rather meat itself) and no more hairballs. At all. It used to be fairly frequent. Just goes to show you that food from the vet is not always better.

Blogging is serious work ;)Along the same lines, Ianiv grabbed some video of me last week liveblogging Gilmore Girls. With a script an average of 35 pages longer than most 1 hour shows, liveblogging Gilmore Girls can be quite the feat. One I will be repeating again tonight.

This is a usability beef of mine. I think there is a general disagreement about which linking method is better: in-window or new window.

On the one hand, if you open a link in the same window, you have the whole ‘need to go back’ phenomenon, and that’s not something a web owner wants to deal with. Too much fall off.

On the other hand, if you open a link into a new window, you can frustrate people, like me. It’s not obvious upon hover that a link will or will not open into a new window, and I personally hate it. I use tabs, not windows. Sometimes I don’t want to go back. And if I have to wait for another window to open in order to then close it to minimize screen clutter, I won’t be happy.

Here is another reason why I don’t think you should force links into new windows: they are called tabs. If I want to stay on a site, I simply open a link into a new tab. Simple as that.

I think people who continue to use ‘open in new window’ links are selfish ‘traffic whores’, excuse the term. These people are incredibly afraid of losing their traffic, hoping people will instead dig around more if their window stays open. I just get pissed off.